GOt my nintendo ds today

[jvd]

I got my ds today.

It came with mario 64 ds and the metriod demo.

Let me first say that i'm at 7 and a half hours of the thing being on and played by myself or my sisters . THe battery is still going strong although with out wireless as there is no one to play with haha .

THe graphics are sharp and crisp and look very good in motion . Mario 64 ds looks much better than mario 64 . Its def a step up . It looks better than conkers with the 4 meg expansion so to me that is a plus.

For the unit it self , well my hands start to hurt after 40 mins .

Monday i will be picking up some more games so i will give more impressions

 

[Cryect]

ick that sucks on hands hurting after 40 minutes. Hopefully its something that your hands get used to over time

 

[thop]

You should get Feel the Magix XX/XY for your sisters (and for yourself ). How are you playing Mario64? Dpad? Touchscreen?

 

[Ty]

What do you think of MP-H with the thumb strap?

How responsive is the input? In other words, do you feel or notice any sort of lag when trying to get Samus to run in one direction or the other?

 

[zurich]

Will it play GBA flash carts?

 

[marconelly!]

Yeah, I figured it might be a bit difficult to hold something that's almost 300g heavy with only one hand and with the center of balance pushed forward due to a seconds screen. That's of course, when you use stylys for control, but for Mario you can probably use that thumbstrap thingie so that you can hold the unit with both hands.

Good to hear Mario looks good. I've been watching some direct feed videos of the game, and it looks like N64 Mario with some more detailed objects, without texture filtering, but with 2x increased framerate it definitely moves smoother. One thing I didn't like is that the 3D graphics in Mario DS seems a bit 'shaky', and that was the case with Asphalt GT as well (to an even greater degree. Feel the Magic game, that doesn't use many textures, seemed to not have that problem, though.

 

[jvd]

ick that sucks on hands hurting after 40 minutes. Hopefully its something that your hands get used to over time

remember i'm 6'4 so i have big hands. My sisters are fine with it. Its still better in my hands than the gba was . That hurt after 10 mins

You should get Feel the Magix XX/XY for your sisters (and for yourself ). How are you playing Mario64? Dpad? Touchscreen?

I was sent the ds for free. Its the only thing i get to brag about haha . I'm playing mario with the dpad. Still to unused to the touch screen .

What do you think of MP-H with the thumb strap

ITs pretty good. Even writing with the thumb strap is nice.

I used the thumb strap on my dads palm and compared writing and what not. THe palm is more accurate but not by much and my father has one of the new palms , got it 3 months ago and his job spent 500$ On it . So thats not a bad comparison

Will it play GBA flash carts?

no clue , don't have any to test

 

[Kill_Jade]

i have Mario 64 DS also but i dont think the touch pad works too well with it. i use the d-pad instead. on a side note MP-H works great with it. the multiplayer was pretty tight too.

 

[kemosabe]

About the graphics processor - some are claiming it's an ARM embedded processor but I haven't found any definitive confirmation of the spec. Anyone know for sure?

 

[Squeak]

I've read somewhere that it has some kind of vector FPU for geometry calculations, but dunno about the 2D part of the SOC

 

[Guden Oden]

About the graphics processor - some are claiming it's an ARM embedded processor but I haven't found any definitive confirmation of the spec. Anyone know for sure?

Dunno what you mean - the DS has two ARM processors, one ARM5 at either 16.7 or 33MHz depending on the source (the slower speed is standard GBA CPU speed) and one ARM9 at 67MHz if I recall correctly. Apart fom that there might be additional 3D hardware, but Nintendo hasn't said anything specific.

 

[Teasy]

I think he means that people are saying that the ARM9 may have a GPU embedded into it. I know that ARM do make a vector unit that can be embedded into the ARM9, so that may be what people are talking about.

There definitely has to be something extra in there anyway. Because the N-Gage has a ARM9 100Mhz (which alone would be more powerful then the ARM7 33Mhz and ARM9 66Mhz in DS) and clearly the DS is quite a bit more powerful then N-Gage.

P.S. my DS is on its way from the U.S right now

 

[Qroach]

There definitely has to be something extra in there anyway. Because the N-Gage has a ARM9 100Mhz (which alone would be more powerful then the ARM7 33Mhz and ARM9 66Mhz in DS) and clearly the DS is quite a bit more powerful then N-Gage.

I wouldn't be so sure of that just yet. I think the two are pretty comparable in 3D performance. As far I know there isn't an embedded GPU in the arm 9 processors for the DS. I'll ask one of the guys that has looked at the docs and hardware more closely.

I've been told it's technically possible to do 3D on both screens at 30hz but I don't know what the poly count is like.

 

[version]

There definitely has to be something extra in there anyway. Because the N-Gage has a ARM9 100Mhz (which alone would be more powerful then the ARM7 33Mhz and ARM9 66Mhz in DS) and clearly the DS is quite a bit more powerful then N-Gage.

I wouldn't be so sure of that just yet. I think the two are pretty comparable in 3D performance. As far I know there isn't an embedded GPU in the arm 9 processors for the DS. I'll ask one of the guys that has looked at the docs and hardware more closely.

I've been told it's technically possible to do 3D on both screens at 30hz but I don't know what the poly count is like.

DS max polygon count 300 000/sec
PSP poly count 30 mil/sec

 

[Evil_Cloud]

There definitely has to be something extra in there anyway. Because the N-Gage has a ARM9 100Mhz (which alone would be more powerful then the ARM7 33Mhz and ARM9 66Mhz in DS) and clearly the DS is quite a bit more powerful then N-Gage.

I wouldn't be so sure of that just yet. I think the two are pretty comparable in 3D performance. As far I know there isn't an embedded GPU in the arm 9 processors for the DS. I'll ask one of the guys that has looked at the docs and hardware more closely.

I've been told it's technically possible to do 3D on both screens at 30hz but I don't know what the poly count is like.

DS max polygon count 300 000/sec
PSP poly count 30 mil/sec

Just like PS2 can do 66 million polygons ey?

 

[Teasy]

Quincy

DS and N-Gage definitely aren't the same in 3D performance. Check out Asphalt Urban GT for both systems. On N-Gage it runs at 20-30fps. On DS it looks noticably better (higher resolution and more polys) and runs at a constant 60fps. Both games were developed by the same team as well. So DS must be quite a bit more powerful then N-Gage. But how its more powerful is what interests me. Hopefully you can find out something from your friend.

BTW I also heard about the 30fps 3D being possible on both screens at once. By rendering at 60fps and alternating the frames between screens.

 

[Teasy]

Version, why did you post that? Quincy (QRoach) didn't say a word about PSP..

BTW your wrong, DS's max transform rate is 1,333,000 polys/s (not 300,000 polys/s).

 

[Squeak]

I've been told it's technically possible to do 3D on both screens at 30hz but I don't know what the poly count is like.

The same, only stretched over two screens.

 

[kemosabe]

Apart fom that there might be additional 3D hardware, but Nintendo hasn't said anything specific.

Yes, 3D hardware is what I was implicitly referring to. There was lots of speculation awhile back about the DS and whether it was comprised in ATI's technology development agreement with Nintendo. I've heard nothing since to suggest that ATI has anything to do with this console and some have speculated that the DS ARM9 processor has an embedded (MBX?) 3D core. Nintendo just doesn't seem to want to clarify this.

 

[Qroach]

DS and N-Gage definitely aren't the same in 3D performance. Check out Asphalt Urban GT for both systems. On N-Gage it runs at 20-30fps. On DS it looks noticably better (higher resolution and more polys) and runs at a constant 60fps. Both games were developed by the same team as well. So DS must be quite a bit more powerful then N-Gage. But how its more powerful is what interests me. Hopefully you can find out something from your friend.

I don't recognize that game. do you have a link or have you tried the game on the DS? It's not one of the launch titles is it? Also which Ngage version was that running on?

Regarding the framerate, Ngage is also running a operating system in the background as it doubles for a phone. So I wouldn't be suprised if a portion of the cpu power was always dedicated to the OS.

BTW I also heard about the 30fps 3D being possible on both screens at once. By rendering at 60fps and alternating the frames between screens.

No I'm talking about each chips rendering a seperate 3D scene at the same time. But if I'll double check.

Once again, as fr as I know there is not any ATI tech or haardware inside the DS. If there was, I'm sure support for texture filtering would have at least been included. Another fact I learned is that the DS doesn't support floating point for 3D, it's fixed point only.